Maggie's Farm

An excerpt from an excerpt from an Alan Charles Kors essay in New Criterion:

The power of universities comes from their monopoly of credentials. As Richard Vedder so deeply understands in his “Going Broke by Degree,” they are the only institutions allowed to separate young individuals by IQ and by the ability to complete complex tasks. They do not add value to that, except in technical fields. Recruiters do not pay premiums because of what the Ivy League or the flagship state universities teach in English, history, political science, or sociology. They hire there despite, not because of, that. Recruiters do not pay premiums because our children have been sent to multicultural centers for sensitivity training. Recruiters pay premiums for the value already there, which universities merely identify. So long as recruiters pay premiums, however, it is rational for parents who wish to gain the most options for their children to send them to the university with the most prestigious degree. That will not change in the current scheme.

A Back to Basics education with 24 students in one room, and a teacher salary of $240,000. This is great. It would entail a meaningful pay cut for me, but I'd do it in a New York minute for the joy and challenge of it. Can I say whatever I want, and can I use my whip? 

I have always claimed that John Adams and Abe Lincoln got better educations than our public school kids get. Of course, they were not the average kids - and you don't "get" an education anyway - you "take" one. Or not.

It is no longer PC to acknowledge that relatively few are able, interested, motivated, or inspired to engage in a serious classical education. For good reason, too: it's not practical and it's difficult, and most jobs do not require calculus or music theory. Result? Watered-down non-rigorous gruel and As and degrees for all, accompanied by a dose of leftist propaganda and multicultural BS. And that's OK, because you cannot get wisdom in school (except maybe a basis for historical wisdom, but that's easy to do on your own once your Mom teaches you to read).

Now back to do the bidding of She Who Must Be Obeyed in the gardens. Adding "organic material," ie our recent truckload of slightly aged manure (a sweetly odoriferous and oozing mountain in the back driveway) from my dairy farmer pal, to the new perennial beds. I will have to dig it in, 2' deep. I will dump some on top of my vegetable garden too, as mulch to be dug in next Spring. Then horseplay later, if it doesn't rain: I could use a sherry or two for courage and a vintage stogie this afternoon, followed by a good gallop over hill and dale with the Mrs. to let today's cool Yankee wind clear my head of the nonsense in life. If rain, maybe indoor horseplay with the same goal.

Editor note: Photo is an early 1800s one-room schoolhouse in Norwalk, CT

Stumbling and Mumbling linked to a site which discusses the two Latin roots of the English word "education:"

Craft (1984) noted that there are two different Latin roots of the English word "education." They are "educare," which means to train or to mold, and "educere," meaning to lead out. While the two meanings are quite different, they are both represented in the word "education." Thus, there is an etymological basis for many of the vociferous debates about education today. The opposing sides often use the same word to denote two very different concepts. One side uses education to mean the preservation and passing down of knowledge and the shaping of youths in the image of their parents. The other side sees education as preparing a new generation for the changes that are to come--readying them to create solutions to problems yet unknown.

Of course, formal education - as opposed to all of the other education life offers - has the job of both "putting stuff in" and "drawing good stuff out."

But people vary widely in intelligence, talent, energy, curiosity, and ingenuity. Simon at Classical Values in Romantic Intellectualism has a fine discussion of American education, and about how PC prevents many from talking honestly about things like No Child Left Behind. (His post highlights  Charles Murray's The Age of Educational Romanticism in The New Criterion). Simon concludes his post thus:

"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water." -- John W. Gardner, Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1962

In other words not every man has equal intelligence. All have equal dignity if they comport themselves in a dignified manner. We owe the maintenance of our civilization (and it takes a lot of maintaining) to our plumbers and garbage men. We owe the advances to our scientists and engineers. What we must never forget is that we are all in this together. The man/woman who is respectful and contributes deserves our respect without qualification. The financial trader or the clerk at the grocery store.

Let me add one final point that the article didn't make that I think is vitally important and not well addressed in many communities. Hard work can make up to a 15 IQ point difference in outcomes (sorry no link). That is one standard deviation. It is not a lot. It is however significant. You can make up for some lack of anything with extra effort. How many times do we hear of the ball player with less than stellar abilities make up for his lack by devoting more time to practice than his team mates? What works in baseball also works in school. You can punch above your weight if you work at it.

Back to the S&M piece, in which Chris Dillow wonders about the differences between the Brit private and state schools. It begins:

The other day I was toiling away when I heard a series of loud bangs. "What idiot is setting off fireworks in the middle of the afternoon?" I wondered. I went out to find out. It was Oakham School's army cadets having shooting practice.

Which set me thinking:  isn't private schooling so good? It's education in the sense of "educere" - drawing out whatever latent talents a student has. If someone doesn't have the aptitude for academe, they are given the chance to excel at something else: the military, or music (Oakham School has a thriving music department) or sport: the school's county-standard facilities has recently helped it produce some fine cricketers.

Contrast this to the Marxian view, which regards (state?) schools as means for moulding people to meet the requirements of capitalism - a view which New Labour, which regards the state as a human resources department, seems to regard not as a criticism but as a policy ideal.

From Roger K on "post-colonial studies" at Harvard:

In the ambivalent world of the “not quite/not white,” on the margins of metropolitan desire, the founding objects of the Western world become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouvés of the colonial discourse—the part-objects of presence. It is then that the body and the book loose [sic] their representational authority. Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body.

I first read those words back in the 1980s and knew instantly that its author was destined for academic stardom.

Indeed. I think the Prof must be talking about me, because I often feel like a "part-object of presence," don't you? I blame Brit imperialism for that, and my little bestiality issue would seem to confirm it.

Christina Hoff Summers on the dearth of women in math and science, as quoted in a piece at Attack Machine:

Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “prob­ably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is leg­endary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester fresh­man course meets for three hours a week, but, as the catalog says, homework for the class takes between 24 and 60 hours a week.

and

“I guess you can say it’s an episode of ‘Survivor’ with people voting themselves off.” The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”

Why do women avoid classes like Math 55? Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physi­cal sciences?

A healthy rebellion against the teacher's union and for the students (h/t, Insty). Does anyone today doubt that the reactionary unions are the largest obstacle to experimentation for problem schools? These kids need a chance.

A piece in The Nation instructs teachers in how to slip "Social Justice Education" into everything they teach.

It's sick out there, and getting sicker.

Those were the first three questions asked of She Who Must Be Obeyed by the young Barristerette's college advisor. No, no, and, sadly, no. ("Big bucks" seems to mean a third to a half million at minimum, with more to follow if your kid doesn't flunk out)

Apparently legacies do not carry too much water anymore except at Princeton, and extracurricular passions matter little unless almost world-class ability has been demonstrated. We were also advised that GPA matters more than the classes taken, so avoid classes in which one cannot excel: schools worry about their magazine rankings, and GPA of kids admitted is a factor in that.

Well, the latter advice made me despair about higher education, because if kids avoid things that are difficult for them in high school for college admission purposes, and then avoid them in college for grad school admission purposes, how will they ever learn what they need to understand the world?

Kids have to take courses in which they cannot excel.

One cannot understand much about this world without calculus, Shakespeare, statistics, economics, chemistry, physics, bio, history, geology, Chaucer, philosophy, religion, music history and theory... etc. Of course, you can learn all these things after you get "educated" in schools (not so easily, though, with statistics and calc) - but then what is formal education good for other than certificate-chasing, professor-employment, and kid-indoctrination?

Sometimes I think I am too old-fashioned for this modern world.

Before I decided to post this little meditation, I ran into this book review/essay re Higher Education's Loss of Purpose. A quote:

...the research ideal devalues the connection with thinkers of the past. The belief that students benefit from participating in a timeless conversation with the great voices of our civilization falls by the wayside.

That was all bad enough, but the tide of political correctness (an edgy term for someone from the heart of mainstream academia) washed over the humanities with the destructive force of a tsunami. Why? Because the insistence of the diversity/multiculturalist crowd that human beings are imprisoned by their immutable characteristics (race, gender, class) means that there is no point in trying to learn from the past. Dead, white males and their “hegemony” are what we must break free of, not learn from. In one of his most penetrating sentences, Kronman asks, “For if my most fundamental attitudes are conditioned by my race and gender, so I cannot help but see and judge the world from the vantage point they fix, how can I ever hope to escape their orbit, subject these attitudes to critical review, and set myself the goal of living in some way other than the one they prescribe?”

Whereas the physical sciences and some of the social sciences have rejected the idea that there is any pedagogical value in “diversity,” the humanities swallowed it whole and thus further degraded their intellectual standing.

Photo on top: An 1837 one-room schoolhouse in Norwalk, CT
Lower image: Harvard College, 1767

Why do we extend to universities the priviledge and advantage of being tax-free and partly if not largely tax-supported institutions?

What is it that they do which is so special? Is it their duty to be conservators of knowledge and wisdom, or to be "adversarial" critics of society?

I would make the case that few of the great thinkers of world history worked for universities, almost none of the great writers, and, until the past 30-40 years, few to none of the great scientists. I would make thae case that, in a world of high liteeracy and high levels of education, professsors no longer represent a unique intellectual priesthood as they might have in the Middle Ages. And I would make the case that there is nothing about being a professor which renders their views of anything outside of their teaching expertise of any more value than my own views.

Mark Bauerlein takes on The Adversarial Campus. One quote:

...the Adversarial Campus Argument isn't really an argument. It's an attitude. And attitudes aren't overcome by evidence, especially when they do so much for people who bear them. For, think of what the Adversarial Campus does for professors. It flatters the ego, ennobling teachers into dissidents and gadflies. They feel underpaid and overworked, mentally superior but underappreciated, and any notion that compensates is attractive. It gives their isolation from zones of power, money, and fame a functional value. Yes, they're marginal, but that's because they impart threatening ideas. The powerlessness they feel rises into a meaningful political condition.

Read the whole, brief essay.

Also, David Thompson on the same topic. A quote:

The idea of academic administrators and professors picturing themselves as Luke Skywalker figures - pitted against an evil empire of oppressive bourgeois vales - is rather quaint and not without comic potential. And, as we’ve seen, ‘rebellion’ of this kind is often difficult to distinguish from absurdity, psychodrama and reactionary role-play.

Buchholtz at Opinion Journal:

Bill Gates has $56 billion to his name. What would you do if he called your home asking you for some money? You'd hang up on the prankster, of course. Now, what would you do if Harvard, with its $35 billion endowment, called begging for cash? My wife and I take out our checkbook. But maybe we should be hitting up Harvard instead.

Princeton's endowment grew by more than $3 billion last year. Three weeks of gains in the Tiger portfolio would have paid for every undergrad's tuition and for a fresh pair of stripes on the mascot. Princeton's nothing special, at least in this case. Over 60 universities in the U.S. have endowments surpassing $1 billion, a fivefold gain in the past 10 years. This lovely fiscal boom has angered some U.S. senators who want to force Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford and many others to spend more from their coffers. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley threatens to pry open the endowments so that, like other charitable groups, they must spend at least 5% of principal each year, compared with the measly 4.2% they chose to spend in 2006, down from 5.1% in 1994 and 6.5% in 1982.

What's happening here? Are rich schools like survivalists, afraid to spend and waiting for the apocalypse? If we looked in Yale's basements would we find a million rows of canned tuna and bottled Evian, guarded by angry bulldogs? The universities have all sorts of sensible rebuttals.

Read the whole thing.